Secret City Season One (Freeman, 2016)
I wouldn’t normally recycle a review this quickly but RNZ Digital’s new weekly “What to Watch” feature is a rare piece of new investment in screen content and I want it to get some attention in case they decide to change their minds.
There are four rotating critics for these pieces and I was lucky enough to help develop the format and go first with a series that had been on my ‘to watch’ list for nearly eight years! (That’s the point of difference for these pieces – going deeper into the streaming catalogues and hopefully finding shows that weren’t highlighted much at the time.)
Sleepy old Canberra is the scene of political and diplomatic shenanigans including murder, cover-ups, double-crosses and double agents. Anna Torv plays political journalist Harriet Dunkley, no longer the top dog in her paper’s parliamentary press gallery. She blew a story about mismanaged mining union pension funds and desperately needs a scoop.
When she sees a body being pulled out of Lake Burley Griffin, Dunkley starts unravelling a yarn involving the Labor government at war with itself over fraught relationships with China and the US, a multitude of Australian intelligence and security acronyms fighting for turf, and Chinese dissidents under cover of the Australian National University Music School.
You can read the whole thing here.
Where to watch Secret City S1
Aotearoa, Canada, USA & UK: Streaming on Netflix
Australia: Streaming on Netflix and Binge
